“Ethan, are you all right?!” Vesma demanded.
“My ego is a little wounded,” I said as I stood up, caught my breath, and grinned. Kegohr’s power boost after a few weeks was far beyond anything I’d encountered before. Hell, the monk had barely been harder to fight than him.
Kegohr bounded toward me and threw a kick that could have caved in a brick wall. I sidestepped it, and the rock behind me shattered into a cloud of dust and stone chips. I countered with an aimed shot at his liver, but Kegohr caught it on his elbow. He bared his tusks in an excited grin as he countered with a crushing left. I managed to cross my arms and block it, but my bones flexed in my arms as he laid me out on the slate as easily as swatting an annoying insect.
“Damn, buddy, you hit hard,” I said.
I rolled over my shoulder, sprang to my feet, and rushed at Kegohr. He jabbed at me again, but I slid under his blow and caught him in the gut with both my feet and all of my momentum. Kegohr grunted and staggered back before I flipped over on the ground to avoid a stomp. The brittle slate cratered under Kegohr’s foot, and I shielded my eyes from the tiny pieces of shrapnel.
I rolled over my shoulder again, sidestepped another enormous punch, and jumped onto Kegohr’s outstretched arm. He grunted as I snaked around to his back, slapped on a tight choke, and squeezed for all it was worth. Kegohr swung wildly and tried to buck me off, but I had my hooks in.
“Go to sleep,” I said in his ear. “Come on, big guy, nap time.”
Kegohr’s chest rumbled, and he slammed his fists together again. The blue fire around him flashed outward in the same grenade-like blast he’d used earlier. I held on with everything I had, but it wasn’t enough to keep my grip, and I flew off his back like a rodeo cowboy. I flipped in the air and landed on my feet as Kegohr’s Physical Augmentation shifted again. Blue gave way to pure white flame, and he spun with a roar. His eyes blazed with blinding light as he sprinted toward me. The ground trembled under his massive stride, and I dived clear of his path. Kegohr’s fists vaporized a small formation of stone like it was brittle glass. I leapt into the air with the best spinning kick I could muster and slammed my foot against his jaw.
Kegohr didn’t budge. His berserker grin widened, and he hit me with a palm strike.
The slate broke apart around me as I slid backward across the rocky ground and came to a grinding halt 15 feet away. Stars danced behind my eyes in a dizzying whirl, air vanished from my lungs, and I stared up at the starry sky in astonishment. Air finally came back into my lungs after a second, and I sat up with a crazy grin on my face.
“Now that's what I’m talking about!” I called back to him.
Kegohr took a deep breath. The white aura of pure power faded into his blue-gray fur, and he strode over to pull me out of the shallow trench he’d dug with my body. I accepted his hand and grimaced as I my nervous system finally kicked in.
My brain was telling me that I’d been run over by a train.
Mahrai and Vesma stared at me in amazement as I shook my head to clear it.
“All right, Kegohr,” I said, “I’ll admit it. You’re stronger than me.”
“Nah, nah, nah,” he said. “You’re still the better Augmenter. We were only using physical attacks.”
“Are you even human?” Mahrai asked me.
I shrugged. “I’ve gotten used to scrapping with stronger types.”
“You should be a smear on the ground,” Vesma said, astonished.
“He’s tough,” Kegohr said.
“You pulled your punches,” I argued. “Still, the rogue monk we tracked down didn’t hit that hard. What the hell are they teaching you up there?”
“The finer points of control,” Kegohr explained. “Master Berrin said that Spirit of the Wildfire is Physical Augmentation, yeah, but there’s stages to it. We gave each of them names.”
“So, regular fire is stage one, right?” Vesma asked.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stage two is the blue stuff. I call it the Enhanced version. And the white stuff, well…” Kegohr shifted, suddenly self-conscious. “Well, I call it Banefire.”
“And you can channel it through this?” Mahrai tapped the handle of his new mace.
Kegohr scooped up the weapon like it weighed nothing. White flame wrapped around him in a blazing inferno, and the steel head of his mace shone with a blinding light.
Kegohr’s muscles rolled under his fur as he arched back and slammed the mace down onto a taxi-sized boulder beside him. The rock came apart with a thunderclap of sheer power, and slag dripped from the head as he grinned and hefted his club over his shoulder.
“Sure can,” he said.
I eyed the pile of boiling stone where the rock had been a second ago. “Remind me not to piss you off, big guy. That’s fucking terrifying.”
Vesma jumped to her feet. “My turn.”
“You really sure you can top that, Ves?” Kegohr asked with a playful smile.
“Maybe not, but I think you’ll like this,” Vesma said.
Vesma stepped out beside Kegohr, tied her hair back into a ponytail with a deft twist of her hands, and stepped into the air as casually as breathing. Snaking streamers of fire flickered around her feet as she stood a foot off the ground. She spun in place and gradually levitated higher with a small, dance-like twirl. A spurt of fire from her boots propelled her further into the air, and she caught herself again with a simple twist of thought.
I’d used something similar in my own fights, but Vesma’s command over her Flight was unprecedented. Even Yo Hin didn’t have her pinpoint control of the
